I wanted to write something profound and uplifting for #transdayofvisibility, but this year the fire's gone out of me a bit. Truth is, I've been having a gender crisis; a lot of stuff happened all at once over the last year, and I found a lot of my impressions of who I was (and who I was becoming) starting to unravel.
So often, it seems that the only constant for me is liminality - existing between one thing, one state, one identity and another, or holding two seemingly contradictory truths at once. Gender is a crossroads right now, a void held in limbo by opposing tensions, spinning its wheels. I have yet to figure out (once again) a coherent way to "do" gender, construct gender, articulate gender in a way that makes sense to me given what I've experienced. What I do know, now as always, is that I don't feel at home within a man / woman binary, though I feel the constant pressure from a binary world to "be" something. Gender is exhausting; I often feel I just want to be called "they" and left alone, even as I get self-conscious about how my voice and body is perceived by everyone around me.
So if there's a takeaway from this, maybe it's that being unsure is a part of life, and there's nothing wrong with being empty. We place so much emphasis on finding our inalienable, essential genders, and on doubling down on our gender convictions for the sake of a world that often doesn't believe us, that coming to this place of limbo left me cold; I've rarely felt more alone in my gender quest than I have this year. But maybe if I talk about it, someone else will feel less alone. Here's to staring into the emptiness.
